When it comes to the overall management of their hog
operation—and the manure management aspects in particular
—Henry Moore III says they work to take care of those details,
using Best Management Practices as guiding principles. “It’s a good
benchmark for our operation,” says Moore, president of
family-owned Bobcat Farms.
Along with colleague Alan Williams, Moore oversees a family
partnership consisting of a 5,000 sow-to-wean farm, an
8,800-head gilt development facility, and—just to round things
out—a 150-head Angus cow/calf operation near the town of Clinton, North Carolina. From the start, Moore and Williams have taken to managing
Bobcat Farms with a high degree of professionalism—and
technology. They opt to utilize PDAs and PCs, rather than pad and
pencil, for record keeping. Utilizing the manure is a great fit for them. In addition to the
water aspect of the manure that is beneficial to the land in the
summer, the contents of the manure, especially the nitrogen, are
all beneficial to the forage they grow for their cattle. “And we’re
lucky in that we have plenty of land for applying manure,” adds
Moore. Of their 500 acres, 350 acres of it is used for their cattle
program. What they have in place now is a manure model that
works for them, notes Moore.